Once Upon a Wardrobe(42)

An Irishman, Jack could have avoided serving in the military, but he joined the Officer’s Training Corps. During the rigors of marching and artillery training, he had to move his rooms to Keble College. There he was assigned a roommate named Paddy Moore, and they became good mates. Together they promised each other that if anything happened to either one of them, they would take care of the other’s family.

Meanwhile, Jack’s studies at Oxford took precedence. The military training was an added duty. It never felt truly likely that he would be sent.

War was merely an idea, an event far off. That is until Jack’s nineteenth birthday, when he found himself in France’s Somme Valley on the front lines, a member of the Third Battalion, Somerset Light Infantry.

When the shelling began, war was no longer an idea or a scene in a book or something Jack acted out with his chivalrous mice in a Belfast attic.

*

Fear trembled through the earth as well as his heart as Jack hunkered down in a muddy trench near his mate Laurence. Jack’s wool uniform was tight, his hat tilted to cover his forehead and keep him warm along with his lit cigarette. The dissonant explosions, screams, buzzing, and pounding echoes resonated through the air. Jack bent lower, awaiting orders from his lieutenant, when something whizzed so near his ear, he froze up. More accurately, it whistled past him. It was a sound like nothing he’d ever heard.

A bullet. It had missed his head by an inch at most, and after it had passed, a thought flew through Jack’s mind. This is war, just as Homer wrote about.

The cold, the wet mud, the marching; it was what Jack had prepared for during his training, yet he was completely unprepared for the reality.

Now that he was on the front lines, his body could do nothing more than go along for the ride. He had never been out of Ireland or England, yet there he was, crouched in a trench with Laurence, the mud thick and dense beneath their feet, the frost biting and frigid. They were hunkered down so low that all he could see were the muddy wood slats of the trench walls, while above them the war raged with sounds like nothing he’d heard before.

The trench was as real as cold, thick mud, as real as hand-grenade blasts nearby, as real as marching to another miserable battlefield until he was marching while asleep, waking to his feet and worn boots still moving, as real as the sleepless fear that crawled through the trenches like smoke. The green grass of England was replaced by a scorched and barren landscape. He wriggled along the ground to inspect barbed wire, slept sitting straight up against a cold muddy wall. This landscape was far away from his university rooms of dark paneled walls, innumerable books, and a piano waiting to let loose its music. But just as he did at university, Jack carried a notebook inside his pocket. He scribbled in it whenever he could, often lines of poetry.

A few months after his birthday, Jack woke in his barracks with a fever and hallucinations: vivid images of a frozen wasteland inhabited by wolves and dryads; the stars trembling in the firmaments and the earth opening in jagged chasms. Faces, distorted and half animal, emerged and faded. His body trembled as if someone was lifting him like a child and shaking him. Jack didn’t know what was real or what was imagined. Eventually they sent him to a hospital and called it trench fever, a disgusting disease caused by lice. Kind nurses tended to his every need, wiping his fevered forehead, bathing him, feeding and caring for him. How he missed his mother those months of illness and all his life.

Lying in the hospital bed one afternoon, a nurse with whom he had interesting discussions about literature brought Jack a different book by George MacDonald: The Princess and the Goblin.

Jack consumed the story as if it were his last meal. One George MacDonald book after another followed: Lilith, At the Back of the North Wind, The Golden Key. He returned to what had sustained him in past times of fear and sorrow—reading and writing, poetry and myth—until finally he took pen to paper and wrote more poetry.

It took five months for nineteen-year-old Jack to get better in that hospital. When the fever weakened and his strength returned, Jack was back at the front lines for the battle that would change his life. On April 15, 1918, Jack Lewis and his regiment were part of the British offensive attacking German defenses near Arras. Bullets whizzed past. Bravery mixed with cowardice as idealistic and frightened young men fought for freedom, defining courage not by being free of fear but by fighting in spite of the fear.

Seven days of that battle were shaped by blood and shattered bones, collapsed buildings, and smoking piles of rubble. It was a nightmarish world. By the end of the battle, the Somerset Infantry had taken the village of Riez du Vinage and captured sixty German soldiers. On that cold April morning, a British shell was shot toward the Germans, but it fell short, scattering its lethal power at Clive Staples Lewis, his mate Laurence Johnson, and Sergeant Harry Ayres, a man who had become very much like a father to Jack. Sergeant Ayres took the brunt of the explosion and Laurence also fell. Pieces of shrapnel bit into Jack’s body.

Jack crawled through mud and dirt, through debris and bodies, to find his way to a stretcher bearer for his sergeant and mate. He wasn’t a hero; he was another soldier trying not to die by bullet or bomb. Jack was whisked away to a hospital in étaples. Those jagged scraps of a British shell made to wound the enemy were lodged in Jack’s body: his left arm, his leg, and most dangerously, his chest.

Laurence and the sergeant were dead. Jack survived, but even as he was taken to Liverpool to heal, he could not reckon with the fact that had any of them switched places, if he had been two steps to the left or right, or if Harry or Laurence had walked away, the grim and miserable outcome would have been different.